Real LI

Mill Neck's "Wychwood" has passed hands: The estate of Henry Luce III, longtime publisher of Time and son of the magazine's founder, recently sold the property for $5.5 million. The 1937 mansion is on 13 acres and "has absolutely beautiful views looking out on Oyster Bay Harbor, Centre Island and the Long Island Sound," says Patrick Mackay, president of Locust Valley-based Piping Rock Associates, which listed the property. "But it needed help." The house went on the market in September 2006 and had been listed for $7,250 million. Mackay would only say that someone "in the real estate business" bought the property. Records show a buyer by the last name "Burman," a well-known name in Long Island development. "He appreciated this," Mackay says of the buyer's reaction to the property, "and he's going to do a bang-up job on it." The house was designed by Manhattan architect Henry Corse, whose great room was used for a scene in the 1979 movie "Hair." The Luces bought the house in the mid-70s from Dorothy Fordyce, a local attorney who had subdivided the property and sold off plots.